While Tom Bickle, an astronomy student from Southampton, England, was spending his free time listening to music while looking at the stars at night in search of a “ninth planet,” he discovered an “unusual” thing that looked like a weak spot moving very quickly in. face on the computer screen.
The strange object was traveling at a speed of up to 1 million miles per hour (1.6 million kilometers per hour), which could be enough to separate it from the gravity of the Milky Way Galaxy, according to a newspaper report.New York Times“.
This high speed made the discovery very interesting for scientists, who saw it as an opportunity to study the oldest and fastest stars in the galaxy, known as halo stars.
This type of star moves in unusual orbits compared to the stars of the constellation in the galactic disk, where their orbits deviate from the plane of the galaxy.
This suggests that it may have been formed before the Milky Way Galaxy settled into its current structure, according to researchers.
More than a dozen hypervelocity stars have been discovered so far, moving at speeds in excess of 900,000 miles per hour, which is more than twice the speed of the Sun, but all weigh as much or more than that mass. the sun
“A ‘Fast Little Star’ May Be on Its Way to Escape Our Galaxy” by Katrina Miller via NYT https://t.co/jVzg27V3EU pic.twitter.com/884WH5vqtD
– Christy Isham (@isham_christy) August 21, 2024
In contrast, Beckel’s discovery, named CWISE J1249 + 3621, is only 8 percent of the mass of the Sun, and is on the border between a star and a “brown dwarf”.
What is the secret?
There are two possible theories as to how this star reached such a high speed.
The first one indicates that the object was orbiting a “white dwarf”, and the impact of a star explosion caused it to reach this distance.
An artistic illustration of the first theory (from the New York Times)
The second assumes that the object was part of a star cluster that interacted with a pair of black holes, causing it to be violently ejected from its system.
Credit for the discovery of this star goes to three amateurs, through a project called “Backyard Worlds: Planet 9”, where participants search for moving sources in images taken with NASA’s Wide Field Infrared Observatory, which stopped its mission in July.
An artistic illustration of the second theory (from the New York Times)
Despite the high speed of the object, which may seem amazing to us on Earth, the space is very large, which means that scientists can study this object “without rush,” in the words of an American newspaper.
The object may be moving at a speed of a million miles per hour, but it only travels 1.5 light years every thousand years, which is enough time to understand more about this unique discovery.
2024-08-22 15:42:11
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